One of the new features of Lync 2013 (or, if you’d like, call it just a powershell command) which is not discussed often is “Get-CsClientAccessLicense”. Which is why I’d like to share this one.

Yes, it does exactly as says – it will display the Client Access Licenses used in your Lync deployment! This might be handy when you want to know how many CAL’s you actually need to purchase, or the other way: what features you need to disable (or for how many people) to comply with your purchased / available CAL’s. Please note that the command doesn’t provide a 100% hit, there are some flaws, but it will definitely give you an insight and the tooling to work with in those scenario’s.

The power of this command is that it is quick, you can set an start- and end date it will count in between, and choose whether you’d like to see the CAL’s used on a User-based or Device-based basis.

To run this command, monitoring needs to be enabled and you need to provide the monitoring database SQL instance. You also need to provide which CAL you’re looking for, user- or device- based, and the scoping – start and end dates. When running without any parameters the required ones will be asked:

For more information about this command and its syntax, please review the technet article.
As mentioned, there are some situations where the number might be under- or over calculated. For these situations, I’d also like to refer to the technet article.